John Safran’s Depends What You Mean by Extremist digs into the motivations behind Australian extremism.
Photograph: Penguin Random House

John Safran has made a career of taking a sharp stick to the slumbering bear of Australian identity politics. So it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been reporting his way through the rise of our extremist fringe. His new book, Depends What You Mean By Extremist, is a whirlwind tour through Australia’s increasingly visible radical and reactionary demimonde, from early Reclaim Australia rallies in 2015 to the return of Pauline Hanson in 2016.

Safran gets stoned with the United Patriots Front; attends a sermon by the Catch the Fire Ministries’ pastor, Daniel Nalliah; hangs out with the Muslim convert and firebrand preacher Musa Cerantonio (who has since been arrested and charged for allegedly attempting to join the Islamic State); and trains with a local sort-of-recruiter for the Israeli defence forces, Avi Yemini.

As a cultural observer – on ABC and SBS television, on Triple J radio, and now in books – Safran has always had an unusually receptive antenna for the fraught collision of racial, cultural and religious difference. Or, as he writes in Extremist: “I’ve been into racists since high school.”

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Sitting in a cafe in the Melbourne suburb of Balaclava, Safran mulls over the origins of this sensibility: part comes from growing up Jewish in the mostly non-Jewish East Balwyn; a bit more comes from having grandparents who escaped the Holocaust. And then there was the religious education class he took as a kid, when his teacher got mad about Mel Brooks’ Hitler Rap.

His own comedic stunts include going blackface on the streets of Chicago, getting crucified, encouraging a British sheikh to place a fatwa on Rove McManus, and rifling through Ray Martin’s bins. It’d be easy to label him a provocateur if there wasn’t genuine curiosity lurking behind the pranking.

Safran attributes this interest in religious experience (however strange its manifestation) to his attendance at Yeshivah College in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Founded by the messianic Jewish movement Chabad, the high school gave him a front-row seat at the intersection of spiritual fervour with everyday life – a phenomenon, he says, much of Australia fails to grasp.

“In Australia we don’t get religion,” he says. “Aussies think religion is, oh you rock up to church at Easter or for weddings, and you make this separation between the two hours you’re in church and your life outside it … They just cannot get their head around the fact that people fall under the spell of scripture and really believe it.”

We can chat endlessly about the minutiae of sports, he says, but we turn spiritual matters – essential to the lives of many around the world – into an awkward footnote. “It does not add up that somehow AFL football is more complex and important and deserving of discussion than religion.”

Australia’s inability to engage in religious debates – especially about worrisome parts of scripture – is, Safran says, the source of a lot of national anxiety; a void that politicians like Hanson exploit when they present themselves as spokespeople for the otherwise unspoken.

Protesters at a United Patriots Front rally in Melton, Victoria. Photograph: John Safran

Safran’s award-winning first book, 2013’s Murder in Mississippi, was ostensibly a narrative about how a white supremacist leader, Richard Barrett, came to be murdered by a young black man, Vincent McGee. But it was equally a careful unspooling of the myriad racial tensions and contradictions that mark their home state of Mississippi. Safran was fascinated to learn, for instance, that the virulently racist Barrett was viewed with affection in his largely black neighbourhood, where his notoriety as a skinhead went mostly unnoticed.

This kind of seeming paradox is the meat of Depends What You Mean by Extremist, where the deeper Safran digs into the motivations and personalities behind Australian extremism, the more the ground shifts beneath him. Early in the narrative he meets Ralph Cerminara, a hardcore supporter of the white nationalist UPF who Safran is surprised to learn has both Italian and Aboriginal heritage, and a Vietnamese wife. He is surprised again when he attends a rally against multiculturalism and observes its rather multicultural audience. This type of thing is a sore point for progressive partisans, and prodding at it gets them “agitated”.

For Safran, the messiness is the story, and he tells me he avoided writing a collection of think pieces in favour of a journey into muddied waters. This is an Australia where as soon as you draw a cultural, racial or religious battle line somebody strolls up to smudge it.

While Murder in Mississippi suggested that a divided society might eventually heal itself, there’s none of that optimism in Depends What You Mean by Extremist. It’s inflected with the paranoia of the frontline. “When I was writing the book I was really getting neurotic,” Safran says. “Because I was hanging out with a not-representative sample of the community, I was like, ‘Oh this is fucked.’”

The proliferation of odd bedfellow partnerships, including the collusion of the Hitler-quoting white nationalist Blair Cottrell with the pastor Daniel Nalliah, is here not evidence of integration in progress but of calculated political manoeuvring. “Everyone is leveraging everyone else,” Safran says, for their own “in-house tribal agenda”.

He says he has more perspective now that he’s stopped writing the book. But it still ends on a note of apprehension: the UPF’s momentum seems to have dissipated, after a bungled attempt to get on the ballot for the 2016 election; but other extremist parties are emerging, Hanson is back, and Donald Trump is casting a long shadow.

“Part of the thing I captured in the book, is that we’re in this state of flux – of brinkmanship – where everyone is working things out. Who is on my team? Who isn’t? Everyone’s working out [their] next step. I don’t know what that will be.”

•Depends What You Mean By Extremist is out now through Penguin Random House; John Safran is appearing at Sydney writers’ festival, which runs 22-28 May